Gnome and KDE are examples of what is possible for localization. Their developers have built the necessary localization infrastructure, and they utilize it to its fullest. For example, the existence of a German user interface is considered a matter of course.

Ideally, a German language manual would come with every German language interface, but this is often not the case. The open source community is trying to change this, however, at least with respect to suitable technical foundations. Po4a [1] counts among those efforts.

Localization Is Possible

The possibility for localizing documentation used in Unix handbooks also exists. The documentation in these handbooks is written using groff macros or in Mdoc format, with the latter used mostly by BSD. In reality, the state of affairs regarding localization of documentation is rather bleak. Most of the translated versions come from external projects, such as Manpages-de [2]. For example, Figure 1 shows the German language manual page for the chown command for the GNU Coreutils, produced by the Manpages-de project.

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